Frederic Spiegelberg and the AAAS: Stanford Zen +^

[Disbasing Zen Stories]

Toxic Zen Story #23: Stanford Zen: Frederic Spiegelberg, Alan Watts and the American Academy of Asian Studies.

| 'And there was something of that around this
| Academy of Asian Studies; I mean, I'm not
| exaggerating. I went into a bookstore down at
| Stanford and there was this kind of wise, tough
| old guy from Arkansas who ran it. I went to get a
| copy of one of Aurobindo's books and he kind of
| cocked his head and looked at me and said, "Ah,
| Spiegelberg ... defiling the young men of Palo
| Alto," and he turned around and said, "Aw, they
| come in here one after another." There was a sense
| about that school and about that circle of
| teaching that was ... that made an unforgettable
| impression on people there .... You could go as
| far as you wanted with people like Haridas or
| Spiegelberg or Rom Landau.' - Michael Murphy

____ Background for Toxic Zen Stories ____________________

https://groups.google.com/group/alt.zen/msg/b4ad0ce368728934?hl=en

____ Introduction ________________________________________

A frequent visitor to Landsberg Prison where Hitler was writing Mein Kampf with the help of Rudolf Hess, was General Karl Haushofer, a university professor and director of the Munich Institute of Geopolitics.

Haushofer, Hitler, and Hess had long conversations together. Hess also kept records of these conversations. Hitler's demands for German "Living Space" in the east at the expense of the Slavic nations were based on the geopolitical theories of the learned professor.

Haushofer was also inclined toward the esoteric. as military attache in Japan, he had studied Zen-Buddhism. He had also gone through initiations at the hands of Tibetan Lamas. He became Hitler's second "esoteric mentor", replacing Dietrich Eckart.

Eckart was an occultist and magician leader of the Thule Society who was certainly the earliest corrupting influence on Hitler's psyche. But after Eckart's death and meeting Haushofer, Adolph took a hard right turn to become the first Nazi.

In "The Morning of the Magicians" (1960; 279) by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier they write:

. 'Occultism teaches that, after concluding a
. pact with hidden forces, the members of the group
. cannot evoke these forces save through the
. intermediary of a magician who, in turn, can do
. nothing without a medium. It would seem therefore
. that Hitler must have been the medium, and
. Haushofer the magician. Rudolf Hess had been
. Haushofer's assistant when the latter was a
. professor at the University of Munich.'
.
. 'It was he who had brought Haushofer and
. Hitler together. His flight to England during the
. war was the result of Haushofer having told him
. that he had seen him in a dream flying to England
. in an airplane. In one of the rare moments of
. lucidity which his inexplicable malady allowed him
. the prisoner Hess, the last survivor of the Thule
. Group, is said to have stated formally that
. Haushofer was the magician, the secret Master.
(see Jack Fishman: The Seven Men of Spandau.)'

Thusly, Nazism is an offshoot of Zen, mixed with occultism and Tibetan Buddhism and some other things. Clearly, however, the influence of the Void is predominant: the thought that life is just there for whatever possibility you want to pursue, no-holds-barred, and without concern for the results in the lives of others. Nazism is basically Zen.
___________________________________________________

We know the basic story of D.T. Suzuki, and the fact that he had one face showing towards Japan's Imperial Way Zen, and a different face showing towards the West. And that, for obvious reasons, never the twain would meet.

We know that Suzuki went to America as a young man, to accompany his master, the Rinzai priest Soyen Shaku, to LaSalle-Peru, Illinois, at the behest of Dr. Paul Carus, a German who was the managing editor of Open Court Publishing, which was owned by Zinc magnate Edward Hegeler.

We know that after leaving America, Suzuki influenced people around the world and was one of the stalwart supporters of the Japanese War with Russia, and then in China.

We know that Suzuki's influence in academic circles in Europe was profound, and particularly in mentoring Eugen Herrigel. Herrigel's work erroneously describing the Zen influences on Japanese archery was a twisted mirror to Suzuki's work describing the Zen influences in Bushido swordsmanship.

We know that he had a variety of collaborators, a flock of followers, and influenced many others:

Collaborators in the propagation of Soyen Shaku (D.T.'s Master)-D.T. Suzuki Zen:
Beatrice Lane (wife), Paul Carus, Edward Hegeler, Martin Heidegger, Frederic Spiegelberg, Father Thomas Merton, Alan Watts, Eric Fromm, Carl G. Jung, Richard de Martino, Karen Horney, and a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to lecture extensively at Columbia University and other East Coast schools in the 1950's.

Followers of Shaku-Suzuki Zen:
John Cage, Jack Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Philip Whalen.

Those strongly affected by the Shaku-Suzuki Zen Influence:
Aldous Huxley, Karl Jaspers, Arnold Toynbee, Gabriel Marcel, Herbert Read, and Lynn White Jr.
___________________________________________________

In the Nirvana Sutra it states "Rely upon the Law and not upon persons".

On the topic of "evil friends", who are a "friend" to you, but an enemy of the Law, and who gradually pull you away from the truth and into hellishness, Nichiren writes:

. 'The Buddha states: "Have no fear of mad
. elephants. What you should fear are evil friends!
. Why? Because a mad elephant can only destroy your
. body; it cannot destroy your mind. But an evil
. friend can destroy both body and mind. A mad
. elephant can destroy only a single body, but an
. evil friend can destroy countless bodies and
. countless minds. A mad elephant merely destroys an
. impure, stinking body, but an evil friend can
. destroy both pure body and pure mind. A mad
. elephant can destroy the physical body, but an
. evil friend destroys the Dharma body. Even if you
. are killed by a mad elephant, you will not fall
. into the three evil paths. But if you are killed
. by an evil friend, you are certain to fall into
. them. A mad elephant is merely an enemy of your
. body, but an evil friend is an enemy of the good
. Law." (Nirvana Sutra) Therefore, even more than
. venomous serpents or malevolent demons, one should
. fear the evil friends who follow Kobo [japanese
. true word/shingon founder: tantric buddhism],
. Shan-tao [third chinese nembutsu patriarch], and
. Honen [japanese pure land/jodo sect founder]. This
. is just a brief clarification of the error of
. holding distorted views.'

"Reply to Hoshina Goro Taro" - Writings of Nichiren Daishonin, p. 159

____ Toxic Zen Story ______________________________

From "The Study of Religion under the Impact of National Socialism", by Gerd Simon:

. 'Holding a position explicitly designated to
. the study of religion, the following were removed:
. Hans Alexander Winkler from Tuebingen university
. as former member of the Communist party. According
. to the anti-Jewish legislation Joachim Wach lost
. his lectureship in Leipzig, Martin Buber and his
. pupil Norbert Glatzer in Frankfurt. In 1937
. Friedrich, then Frederic, Spiegelberg, lecturer
. for history of religions at the technical
. university of Dresden, emigrated to the United
. States. From 1941-1962 he then taught at Stanford
. University as professor for comparative religious
. studies.'
___________________________________________________

From Judy Matthew's article on Spiegelberg:

| 'One of the most precious gifts I have ever
| received was the friendship of Dr. Frederic
| Spiegelberg, former president of CIIS. Along with
| so many people who knew and loved him, I feel deep
| sadness that he is gone; at the same time, I am
| happy to be able to share this tribute to him with
| the CIIS community.'
|.
| 'Our connection began, in an appropriately
| synchronistic way, in the library of the C.G. Jung
| Institute of San Francisco. I was doing some
| personal research on Indian art and philosophy and
| came across a tape of one of Dr. Spiegelberg's
| lectures, "The Yes and No of Yoga." I checked it
| out, took it home, and found that listening to it
| was an extraordinary experience.'
|.
| 'First, there was his voice. Alan Watts, in
| his autobiography, recalled that Dr. Spiegelberg
| "spoke English with a delicate German accent which
| always suggests a sense of authority and high
| culture." Then, in addition to the most
| straightforward and lucid discussion of yoga I
| have ever heard, there was an amazing series of
| first-hand accounts of his meetings with people
| like Carl Jung, Martin Heidegger, Ramana Maharshi,
| and Sri Aurobindo.'

The perfect "evil friend", is one that makes you excited about encountering evil. One that makes you feel secure and safe, while you encounter evil. One that makes you feel that you are exploring something wonderful, while you encounter something that is in reality, quite horrible. One that makes you feel privileged to receive the toxic dose, from such an august person as he.

Judy continues ...

| 'I conducted several taped autobiographical
| interviews with him. It was clear that the
| unifying thread that ran throughout his life was
| his intense curiosity, about, as he put it, "'the
| ultimate questions -- the mystery of existence,
| the riddle, the miracle, the astonishment of
| Being." He spoke of "the search, the never ending
| search about the Being of Being and the
| impossibility to catch it, and yet the necessity
| to go on searching for it." He agreed with his
| close friend Paul Tillich that the quest for the
| miracle of Being is what really makes us human.'

Ahh, yes. The "Ultimate Mystical Experience" guided by the most experienced spirit guide. Carefully navigating the rocky shoals, to allow your little ship to arrive safely, in the worst possible place.

The evil cause here, is not paying attention to the Nirvana Sutra: "Rely upon the Law and not upon persons". As soon as you hand over control of your life to a person, instead of studying the teachings yourself, you are in the charismatic trap, with no way to tell whether the direction is safe, or even positive. Ishin Denshin, or mind to mind transfer can only be relied upon to transfer corruption between master and disciple.

Judy continues ...

| 'From the time he was a very small child at
| the turn of the century, listening to his mother
| reading stories from the Bible, his earliest
| memories centered around his growing desire to
| pursue these "ultimate questions."' He kept being
| drawn further on this path, studying and teaching
| theology, philosophy, psychology, comparative
| religion and Sanskrit at the best universities in
| Germany with such teachers as Rudolf Otto, Paul
| Tillich, Rudolph Steiner and Martin Heidegger.
| Carl Jung also became a mentor and friend; Dr.
| Spiegelberg attended the Eranos conferences and
| lectured at the Jung Institute in Zurich.'

The coin of the realm for a first rate "evil friend" is varied experience, with many, many contacts.

Judy continues ...

| 'Dr. Spiegelberg spoke with me about his idea
| of "the religion of no-religion." '
|.
| 'Like his early mentor, theologian Rudolf
| Otto, he was less concerned with the meaning,
| character and attributes of God, or with the myths
| about Christianity and other religions. Instead,
| he was fascinated by, "the religious consciousness
| in which all these ideas are reflected, which has
| in the first place created all these myths and
| ideas because it wants to express itself in
| objective terms." '

There it is. The evil function of the mind that discourses about how pointless the world really is, how religion is manufactured by man to fill the emptiness. Isn't that a religious view? Predetermining that life is empty? That's certainly a fine precursor to Zen and the void.

| 'Dr. Spiegelberg was closer to ultimate
| sources of inspiration than anyone I have ever
| known. Now, as I experience his absence, I
| remember the time when I told him how much I
| enjoyed his book Zen, Rocks, and Waters. This
| prompted him to tell me that he had never liked
| the name of the book; his publisher had insisted
| Zen was very trendy at the time-- that the word
| "Zen" had to be included in the title. We both
| laughed. The original title was Vanishing into
| Reality. '

This is the truth emerging in spite of the falsehood. The proof of the misleading nature of this man as a guide, is the inclusion of "Zen" in the name of his book by the publisher, overriding his intent. This is because his conscious intent is not his true mission in life. He leads those foolish enough to follow him into darkness.
___________________________________________________

From Scott London's interview with Michael Murphy:

| 'MURPHY: I got started in this interest in
| high-school. I got interested in some Jungian
| ideas and was influenced a little bit by Spinoza.
| Then I got to Stanford and went through this 18-
| year-old atheistic phase after I heard about
| evolution, which bowled me over. I had been
| thinking I would be either an Episcopalian priest
| or a doctor. By the time I got to college it had
| evolved into becoming a psychiatrist. My family
| had thought I should be a doctor.'
|.
| 'Anyway, I became an atheist for a year and a
| half, until I walked into a course by Frederic
| Spiegelberg -- this tremendous professor of
| comparative religions. He was lecturing about
| "atman" and "brahman." After the first lecture, I
| walked back to my fraternity and said, "I don't
| think I'll ever be the same." ...'

His path was changed by the influence of Spiegelberg. An "evil friend" is an enabler of your path to the undermining of your life. He himself does not take this path, he connects you up. He takes great satisfaction in being the person who makes the connections ... there is great evil power in being the nexus, or connection bridge for the evil paths.

| ' ... Then, over the course of nine months, I
| started to get very interested in the Vedas and
| the Upanishads. Then, particularly, the
| philosopher Sri Aurobindo -- the Indian
| philosopher who saw all the universe as a
| stupendous evolutionary adventure. He talked about
| "mind and supermind." '
|.
| 'I gave up pre-med studies and gave up the
| fraternity and took up these studies. I went to
| India for a year and a half. I then, ten years
| later, started Esalen Institute in Big Sur -- that
| was 33 years ago.'

Were it not for Spiegelberg, there would have been no Esalen. Esalen is discussed in Toxic Zen Story #28, 29 and 30.
___________________________________________________

I will make a case in this posting that the AAAS is the equivalent, for America, to the Shaolin monastery where Bodhidharma created the phenomenon known as Zen. This was definitely not a good thing for the San Francisco Bay Area...

| 'The American Academy of Asian Studies'
| '(From the CIIS Archives)'
|.
| 'The cast: Louis Gainsborough, Frederic
| Spiegelberg, Judith Tyberg, Haridas Chaudhuri, and
| Alan Watts'
|.
| ' "The American Academy of Asian Studies was
| one of the principal roots of what later came to
| be known, in the early sixties, as the San
| Francisco Renaissance." '
| - Alan Watts

Yeah, how did that turn out: did we turn on, tune in and drop out? Or did America just acquire an astonishingly huge drug habit? Watts has at some points been quoted, as well as Suzuki has, as equating LSD to Zen. That's another story.

Gainsborough speaks ...

| 'One night I suddenly woke up for some reason
| or other, sat down, and I wrote an article called
| "Europe or Asia." It outlined what was going to
| happen in Asia if we didn't pay more attention to
| it....'
|.
| 'While I did not realize it at the time,
| this was actually a spiritual experience that
| changed the direction of my life. In typical
| American fashion I first interpreted it as what
| could we do to help the underdeveloped areas of
| Asia and the Middle East, which resulted in a
| worthwhile project [the Peace Corps was eventually
| developed] but this was not the direction to which
| I was destined.'
|.
| 'My thoughts turned to the fact that our
| Western religions all originated in the East, but
| while we paid lip service to these teachings very
| few people seemed to really practice them; take
| the Sermon on the Mount for example. Why? Was it
| entirely our fault? It seemed to me that what had
| happened was that our tree of religion had become
| separated from its roots in the East, but if the
| two could be brought together again our Western
| religious tree would begin to grow into maturity
| naturally, fed by the roots of its own origins.'
|.
| 'Most Western impressions of Eastern
| teachings were colored by visions of Swamis, naked
| men contemplating their navels, Buddhists in sack-
| cloth whirling prayer wheels, wild-eyed Moslems
| waving bloody swords in jihad religious wars-- all
| repugnant to the Western mind.'
|.
| 'Education through ordinary schools? Not
| the solution. The correct approach came to me in
| something Mahatma Gandhi had said when asked why
| he dressed in a dhoti, a half-naked fakir as
| Winston Churchill called him, when actually he was
| a London- educated barrister who could move in the
| highest circles. Gandhi replied that India was a
| country of villages, and unless he dressed and
| lived like the villagers they would never listen
| to him, dressed as a London lawyer. If I could
| dress my vision in American clothes, people would
| listen. A graduate school, the height of American
| academic circles---certainly a dress that would
| make Asian studies respectable beyond question.
| Hence the creation of a graduate school-- what
| seemed like an almost impossible project, but some
| force was urging me on and so I plunged.'
| - Louis Gainsborough

Evil is definitely a force in the world, has a mind of its own and moves from person to person. The mistake here, was the naive notion that any random "Eastern teaching" would be good for the West (sort of like eating whatever mushrooms you stumble across).

The fact is, what teaching you follow matters greatly, as some teachings look good on the surface, but submerged, there is profound evil buried within.

| 'It didn't take me very long to put the school
| together-- within six months I had a school going.
| I had the heads of all the major universities on
| the advisory board: Bob Sproul of Cal, Sterling of
| Stanford, Paul Leonard of Cal State, the president
| of Mills College, and I got the ambassadors of
| most of the Asian countries to come on our
| advisory board.'
|.
| 'I put some rooms in my building in San
| Francisco at the disposal of the school for night
| studies and bought a lot of books to start the
| library off with (a lot of which, incidentally,
| were stolen by the students!).'
| - Louis Gainsborough

Boy, he made sure that when he corrupted his own life, that it would shake the foundations of University life in the Bay Area. What an extensive list of complicity.

| 'To direct studies at the school, Gainsborough
| turned to a brilliant and unconventional Professor
| of Indic and Slavic Studies at Stanford
| University-- Frederic Spiegelberg.'
|.
| 'I asked around-who would be a good man to do
| the field in the way I understood it and people
| said, "Well, the best man would be Professor
| Spiegelberg" and when I told Professor Spiegelberg
| what I had in mind he got all excited! Certainly
| he wanted to come along and help.'
| - Louis Gainsborough

Definitely this is what he showed up to do. What an accomplishment. Here's how he got to this opportune moment...

| 'Frederic Spiegelberg'
|.
| 'The son of a Lutheran Church family in
| northern Germany, Spiegelberg had a lifelong
| fascination with religious experience--
| understanding it in all its dimensions. His family
| allowed his curiosity free rein and his quest led
| him through seven universities and the study of
| eight languages. Spiegelberg's teachers included
| Rudolf Otto and Paul Tillich, Martin Heidegger and
| Carl Jung. Fleeing the Nazi regime, Spiegelberg
| came to the United States and eventually wound up
| at Stanford University where his passionate and
| wide-ranging scholarship built the Religion
| Department virtually singlehandedly into a
| thriving enterprise with hundreds of students.'

All collaborators with D.T. Suzuki. He sowed the seeds of Zen corruption well and widely.

| 'I had never met a person in public lectures
| or even in a church to talk so rapidly across so
| many grand ideas and trivial details, all wrapped
| up together in a nice little cake ... Spiegelberg
| is a cake-maker: he could take all these
| ingredients and synthesize them; he puts them all
| together and they come out in a marvelous new
| morsel-- full of potential, aspiration, and
| vision, and this would come out again and again
| and again....'
|.
| 'One day Spiegelberg walked into the
| lecture hall [at Stanford] and said "Carl Jung has
| died"-- this was the introduction to our Buddhism
| course and we had the most wonderful lecture or
| eulogy on Carl Jung-- it was absolutely
| incredible, and he just poured it out, from A to
| Z: all kinds of intimate details, marvelous
| psychological insights, everything imaginable.'
|.
| 'And then another time, here was the
| Buddhism course: he walks in and says "I just
| finished The Phenomenon of Man by Teilhard de
| Chardin"... whole hour lecture on summation of
| this Phenomenon of Man which has created a literal
| revolution in the Catholic Church, and that was
| our Introduction to Buddhism, because it was more
| important to talk about Teilhard de Chardin.'
| - James Plaugher

A truly gifted evil friend, must be a connection machine: capable of connecting anyone, no matter what their context, with anyone and anything. This requires great power of influence. And it also requires a hypnotic personal style, kind of like Sinbad, throwing out the magic carpet of corruption, and filling your little empty cup with poison.

| 'Spiegelberg's interest encompassed all the
| world's traditions of religion and philosophy.'
|.
| 'I had contact with many Indians, but none of
| them has made such an impression as the reading of
| the books of Sri Aurobindo, which I did in
| Stanford University, where I started teaching in
| 1942. This led to my eventual visit to India on a
| Rockefeller grant in 1948 and '49, where I was
| fortunate enough to have the darshan of Sri
| Aurobindo in Pondicherry.'
| - Frederic Spiegelberg
|.
| 'Spiegelberg also discussed philosophy with
| Ramana Maharshi and had extensive correspondence
| with Sivananda.'
|.
| 'Gainsborough's proposal intrigued
| Spiegelberg, and he set about the task of
| assembling a distinguished international faculty
| for the exciting and important project.'
|.
| 'When I was asked by Mr. Gainsborough of the
| Login Corporation to help him establish a center
| of Asian studies, I was immediately thinking about
| calling a first-rate man from Aurobindo's Ashram
| to join me in this work. After quite a bit of
| correspondence with the Ashram, one suggested Dr.
| Haridas Chaudhuri, who was then head of the
| Philosophy Department at Krishnagar College in
| Bengal to come to join me in this venture in the
| Academy of Asian Studies.'
|.
| 'The question was brought to Sri Aurobindo
| himself, who approved of Chaudhuri's coming to us
| with the word "Acha" (of course!).'
| - Frederic Spiegelberg
|.
| 'Two months later, in December of 1950, Sri
| Aurobindo died.'

So he died of a malady that came on suddenly and killed him in two weeks. This malady came on the month after deciding to send Chaudhuri and add his imprimatur to Spiegelberg's effort.

Any contribution to an enterprise of great evil, is a great evil.

Sending your disciple into certain hell is a guarantee of a hellish end to the mentor who sends him, since mentors and disciples always share the same fate. They both rise or fall together.

This insert on the death of Aurobindo:
_________________________________________________
. From Sivinanda: "Sri Aurobindo passed away at
. 1.30 a.m. on 5th December, 1950 at Pondicherry. He
. was 78 years old. He was suffering from kidney
. trouble for a fortnight and was attended upon by
. Dr. Prabhakar. Sen."
.
. From "Sri Aurobindo's last darshan", by Rhoda
. P. LeCocq: At last it was the morning of November
. 24. At Golconda, rumors flew. Although thousands
. had now arrived for this darshan, it was said that
. Sri Aurobindo was ill and might find it impossible
. to appear. Then at the last minute, we were told
. he was well enough.
.
. A long line led from the main building around
. the block: people of every color, every style of
. dress, government officials and high-ranking
. professors, young and old, from dozens of
. countries, wanted to see the philosopher-sage.
. Each of us finally climbed the stairs to the floor
. where, at the end of a long narrow room, Sri
. Aurobindo in white and the Mother in a gold sari
. sat side by side upon a slightly raised platform.
.
. As a westerner, the idea of merely passing by
. these two with nothing being said had struck me as
. a bit ridiculous. I was still unfamiliar with the
. Hindu idea that such a silent meeting could afford
. an intensely spiritual impetus. I watched as I
. came up in line, and I noted that the procedure
. was to stand quietly before the two of them for a
. few silent moments, then to move on at a gesture
. from Sri Aurobindo. What happened next was
. completely unexpected.
.
. As I stepped into a radius of about four feet,
. there was the sensation of moving into some kind
. of a force field. Intuitively, I knew it was the
. force of Love, but not what ordinary humans
. usually mean by the term. These two were 'geared
. straight up'; they were not paying attention to me
. as ordinary parents might have done; yet, this
. unattachment seemed just the thing that healed.
. Suddenly, I loved them both, as spiritual
. 'parents.'
.
. Then all thought ceased. I was perfectly aware
. of where I was; it was not 'hypnotism,' as one
. Stanford friend later suggested. It was simply
. that during those few minutes, my mind became
. utterly still. It seemed that I stood there a very
. long, an uncounted time, for there was no time.
. Only many years later did I describe this
. experience as my having experienced the Timeless
. in Time. When there at the darshan, there was not
. the least doubt in my mind that I had met two
. people who had experienced what they claimed. They
. were gnostic beings. They had realized this new
. consciousness, which Sri Aurobindo called the
. supramental. Later, this same experience made me
. understand what Heidegger meant by 'standing
. presence.'
.
. Several days later, an English doctor staying
. at Golconda warned me that the condition of Sri
. Aurobindo's health was becoming worse. At 1:30 in
. the morning on December 5, 1950, he passed away of
. a kidney infection. About 3:30 that same morning,
. this was announced to everyone in the ashram. With
. great sorrow, I realized I had been at the last
. darshan at which both of them would appear
. together!
.
. During the day of December 5, I hovered about
. the ashram grounds, feeling desolate. Already it
. has been decided, despite the objections of the
. French colonial governor, that Sri Aurobindo would
. be buried in the courtyard of the main building
. beneath a huge spreading tree. The male
. ashramites, including the visiting doctor, began
. to build the tomb. I watched the doctor, who had
. confided to me that he expected Sri Aurobindo to
. 'reveal himself as an avatar,' and he beat with
. his sledgehammer on the concrete slab as if he
. would destroy death itself.
.
. There was weeping but no hysteria. By
. afternoon, men and women passed baskets of earth
. from hand to hand, as the digging continued
. beneath the tree. Then there was a new
. announcement. For all of us there, there would now
. be a second darshan. In lesser numbers, we filed
. through to view the body of the poet-philosopher
. lying upon his couch in the upper chamber.
.
. Again, the following morning on December 6, we
. all filed past. The 'force field' which I
. mentioned earlier seemed to remain about the body
. and throughout the room. Dressed in white, upon a
. white couch before the windows, Sri Aurobindo now
. lay in state. Bowls of flowers stood around the
. couch; and at the bed's head and foot, disciples
. of long standing sat quietly, heads bowed.
==============================================

| 'Aurobindo is the guiding spirit of this earth
| and the prophet of our age. I believe that the
| last most important contribution that Sri
| Aurobindo made before passing was to send you
| here.'
| - Letter from Spiegelberg to Haridas Chaudhuri

Certainly all of the relative causes of good made during the life Sri Aurobindo, were in comparison finitely small compared to the single act of great evil made by supporting the AAAS by sending Haridas Chaudhuri to give them the international name recognition they sorely desired.

A person whose mission is not to propagate great evil, cannot long survive such acts, they are like the canary in the mine shaft: their passing is a sign that great evil is in the offing.

| 'Spiegelberg also sent a letter of invitation
| to the young chaplain of Northwestern University
| [in the middle to late forties], Alan Watts, who
| agreed to join the enterprise.'

This insert on the corruption of Alan Watts, by the tag team of Frederic Spiegelberg and D.T. Suzuki:
_____________________________________________

From Furlong's book on Watts:

| 'Christmas Zen'
|.
| ' ... In the years that followed, Watts was to
| show little interest in politics; rather, his two
| principal interests would later be psychology and
| religion, and both of these were foreshadowed by
| his youthful adventures in London. He became
| friends with the Jungian analyst Philip Metman and
| an even closer friend of the psychiatrist Eric
| Graham Howe. (It was typical of Watts that years
| later he clearly remembered what Howe had given
| him for lunch at their first meeting --- a fine
| potato baked in its jacket and smothered with
| butter.) Perhaps what psychology seemed to offer
| was yet another form of arcane secrets, knowledge,
| or power. One day Howe introduced Watts to
| Frederic Spiegelberg, an Oriental philosopher who
| was to be important in Watts's life years later in
| California. Spiegelberg made an indelible
| impression on Watts: "He wore a hat with an
| exceedingly wide brim, spoke English with a
| delicate German accent which always suggests a
| sense of authority and high culture, and was
| propagating the theory that the highest form of
| religion was to transcend religion. He called it
| the religion of non-religion." '

This idea of the religion of non-religion allows you to implicitly throw away all religions, and with them the Buddha's teachings: the storehouse of sutras, and with all of those, the Buddha's highest teaching, the Lotus Sutra. Since the Lotus Sutra is the purpose of the advent of the Buddha, and contains the compassion of the Buddha, throwing away that teaching implicitly or explicitly accomplishes the same goal, the removal of compassion in your own Buddha-life, and the opening of your life to evil. This is the action of an evil friend, who likes you, but is an enemy of the Law: attachment to an evil friend always draws you away from the Law, and everything that is good in life, towards darkness.

Furlong continues ...

| 'The religion of non-religion . . . It so
| happened that about the time he was considering
| Spiegelberg's ideas, Watts was being introduced by
| Humphreys to D. T. Suzuki, a tiny Japanese, with
| pebble glasses and a bow tie, who was to influence
| Watts and -any other Westerners in an
| extraordinary way. Then in his late sixties,
| Suzuki had led an interesting and varied life.
| Born of samurai stock, he had nevertheless grown
| up in near poverty because of the early death of
| his father. ...'
|.
| ' ... combined some of these essays with new
| ones to bring out Suzuki's Essays in Zen Buddhism.
| It was this remarkable book that more than any
| other was to attract Westerners to Zen.'
|.
| 'It was not an easy book to read. The mixture
| of learning and playfulness, not to mention the
| unconventional subject and the ideas surrounding
| it, left readers interested but baffled. Many
| people bought it --- it soon went into second and
| third volumes of essays --- but few, seemed to
| know quite what to make of it. Japanese scholars
| at Western universities seemed to resent Suzuki's
| success and accused him simultaneously of
| "popularizing" Zen (they meant cheapening it) and
| of being impenetrably obscure. The American
| Oriental Society, famed for the austerity of its
| approach, gave the opinion in its journal that he
| was a dilettante, and others complained that he
| was not keen enough on "discipline." '
|.
| 'Watts, however, following Christmas
| Humphreys, felt love, admiration, and reverence
| for Suzuki. One of the first times Watts ever saw
| him was during a particularly boring meeting at
| the Buddhist Lodge. Suzuki was playing with a
| kitten, and something about the old man's total
| absorption in the tiny creature gave Watts the
| feeling that he was "seeing into its Buddha-
| nature." '

Now that is a clearly a sexual encounter. And a very mixed-gender reaction, I must say. I wonder if he got hard or wet?

In Buddhism, the greatest evil is associated with the Devil King of the Sixth Heaven. The Sixth Heaven is a rapturous place in the spirit of a person, and this is why a great corruption of an individual is always a rapturous experience for the corrupter and the corrupted, both.

Furlong continues ...

| 'Something in Suzuki the man, as well as in
| his writings, told Watts that he had found the
| principal teacher for his private university, the
| master he had been looking for. Suzuki had none of
| the expensive, ostentatious habits, the easy
| cosmopolitan airs, or the cultural aims of Watts's
| other models, but his stillness and his smile
| touched something lonely and lost in Watts,
| offered a hint of a way out not merely from acting
| instead of being oneself, but also from the
| predicament of being isolated and human, from what
| Watts often thought of as a "bag of skin." ... '

This denigration of his own humanity goes hand in hand with his descent into evil.
=========================================

Watts continues ...

| 'Coming to San Francisco I was plunged into a
| world of associations and activities so complex
| that I can record only outlines refreshed with
| occasional detail, like flowers scattered through
| a filigree of bare stems. For six years I was to
| be absorbed-- for sometimes as much as fourteen
| hours a day-- in teaching, and later in
| administration as well, at the American Academy of
| Asian Studies....'
|.
| 'The American Academy of Asian Studies was
| one of the principal roots of what later came to
| be known, in the early sixties, as the San
| Francisco Renaissance, of which one must say, like
| Saint Augustine when asked about the nature of
| time, "I know what it is, but when you ask me, I
| don't." I am too close to what has happened to see
| it in proper perspective. I know only that
| between, say, 1958 and 1970 a huge tide of
| spiritual energy in the form of poetry, music,
| philosophy, painting, religion, communications
| techniques in radio, television, and cinema,
| dancing, theater, and general life-style swept out
| of this city and its environs to affect America
| and the whole world...'
| - Alan Watts

Notice that he doesn't say positive spiritual energy. At least he is not constantly being misleading.

| 'We had Rom Landau, who was known particularly
| by his book God Is My Adventure and through many
| of his books on Morocco and on Arab mentality. A
| little later I asked Dr. Malalasckhera of Ceylon
| to join us for the teaching of Theravada Buddhism
| and Pali language. And a year later we had Dilip
| Kumar Roy, an Aurobindian, a famous singer and
| musician, along with the dancer Indira. So we had
| in 1951 a most interesting group of people
| assembled.'
| - Frederic Spiegelberg

As was stated above ... a great evil friend is a one-man switchyard to connect people to corruption. The more connections, the greater the rapture from routing this person to that hellish fate.

| 'We had premises, at first in the financial
| district of San Francisco, and later in Pacific
| Heights. We had a very modest library, heavily
| bolstered by books on loan from myself and from
| one of the students, Leo Johnson; a library that
| only began to be adequate in the fields of
| comparative religion and philosophy. But we had an
| interesting faculty. Frederic Spiegelberg, as
| Director of Studies, was the de facto mastermind
| of the project. From India he had invited Haridas
| Chaudhuri, a professor of philosophy at the
| University of Calcutta, and Sir C.P. Ramaswamy
| Aiyar, formerly Diwan of the State of Travancore
| and later Chancellor of the University of Banaras-
| - a princely man, close to seventy, who somehow
| reminded one of the elephant god Ganesha. Then
| there was Judith Tyberg, learned in Sanskrit and
| yoga, and both she and Chaudhuri, together with
| Spiegelberg himself, were enthusiasts for the
| teachings of Sri Aurobindo Ghose .... There was
| also Tokwan Tada, a Japanese lama trained in
| Tibet, who brought with him the entire Buddhist
| canon in Tibetan wood-block prints, and my old
| friend from England, Polish-born Rom Landau, to
| take charge of our Islamic program. There was too,
| for some months, the Princess Poon Pismai Diskul
| of Thailand, an exquisite little lady who years
| before on a visit to London had been characterized
| by the British press as "the Pocket Venus," and
| was at this time curator of the National Library
| of Thailand.'

In the following you see that the money put up by Louis Gainsborough does not get applied in the manner that would be faithful to his intent. Note that Alan Watts so despises him that he doesn't even give his name ...

| 'The entrepreneur who gave the initial funds
| for this project leaned to the view that it should
| be an information service at the graduate level.
| At the time this made sense, because American
| universities were largely ignoring Asian studies;
| their offerings at the undergraduate level were
| almost nil, and at the graduate level were mainly
| preoccupied with research....'
|.
| 'But Spiegelberg and I had no real interest
| in this nonetheless sensible idea of an
| information service about Asian culture, nor was
| this what really concerned Chaudhuri, Aiyar, and
| Tyberg. We were concerned with the practical
| transformation of human consciousness, with the
| actual living out of the Hindu, Buddhist, and
| Taoist ways of life at the level of high
| mysticism: a concern repugnant to academics and
| contemptible to businessmen, threatening to Jews
| and Christians, and irrational to most scientists.
| '

There we go. He truly wanted to change human consciousness, and not necessarily in a positive direction.

So Gainsborough's thought was merely the catalyst for the perversion of Spiegelberg and Watts. A handy vehicle for evil. This "consciousness raising" which includes traditions other than Zen, is merely an artifice. This is because Zen will always ultimately undermine and corrupt those traditions and those practitioners.

It all becomes a gloriously-disguised vehicle for the major Zen corruption event in American history. All the events of the sixties and after flow from this corruption, and the spread of Nichiren Buddhism to try and cope with this corruption.

| 'Two professional fund-raisers cost us more
| than they raised, and the Ford Foundation shrugged
| us off with a shudder. Clearly, we were just
| another California cult trying to assume the mask
| of a respectable educational institution.'

This is the not-in-any-way-concealed awful truth of the matter. It could not be more clearly stated. Esalen and all of the LGAT and cult movements after this time, all flow from this one source of evil.

| 'But then-- only twenty years ago [early
| fifties]-- it was not as easy to see as it is
| today that when you make a powerful technology
| available to human beings with the normal form of
| egocentric consciousness, planetary disaster is
| inevitable. '

Egocentric consciousness is far less dangerous than the evil-centric group mind that these guys are creating. Remember the Nazis? That was primitive compared to this group.

| 'Moreover, the point had to be made that the
| egocentric predicament was not a moral fault to be
| corrected by willpower, but a conceptual
| hallucination requiring some basic alterations of
| common sense; a task comparable to persuading
| people that the earth is round rather than flat.'
|.
| 'This was very largely the subject of
| discussion at the weekly colloquium of the
| Academy's faculty, at which Spiegelberg was the
| invariably provocative moderator, and which became
| an event increasingly attractive to San Francisco
| artists and intellectuals.'
| - Alan Watts

I'm sure they made a perfect pair: Spiegelberg, the fantasizing guru-figure you could place your trust in, and Watts, the mesmerizing corrupter you would not otherwise trust. How diabolical !!!

| 'One of the great events of those early days
| was a colloquium held every Friday Night that was
| chaired by Frederick Spiegelberg, Alan Watts and
| Haridas Chaudhuri. You had to get there about an
| hour early to get into the room, and I remember
| that there were a group of us then from down at
| Stanford. We used to have dinner at the La Fontere
| up here about five in the afternoon, and there was
| this enormous excitement about coming in to the
| old Academy at First and Sansome Street down
| south, and then over on Broadway, to get there
| early enough to sit in on those first meetings.
| And the electricity then was really enormous.'
| - Michael Murphy

Murphy is the guy who started Esalen with Richard Price. They are ultimately responsible for most of the LGAT "training" cults, like EST and Landmark Education, and the trainers who took over Scientology after dispensing with L. Ron Hubbard. Not nice people.

Spiegelberg continues ...

| 'There was at that time not yet any
| competition in the way of live Asian studies in
| America, not even in the Bay Area. We did not have
| at that time any ashrams or Zen monasteries, of
| which we have so many today.'

... Thanks to your diligent efforts at spreading evil, yes, we do.

| 'The beginning of the American Academy of
| Asian Studies became something of a society event
| in San Francisco, where artists and literates and
| important people of many ways of life were drawn,
| particularly to the weekly colloquium, where the
| teachers discussed simple questions, simple
| problems in the most inspiring and elaborate way
| before we opened the meeting to the general
| audience.'
| - Frederic Spiegelberg

I'm sure Frederic kept them enthralled long enough for Watts to hypnotize them and strike like a cobra, delivering his Zenemous bite.

| 'There were some hundreds of students who
| started to gather around that Academy. In those
| early days there were a number of poets who
| contributed later to the San Francisco
| renaissance: Gary Snyder used to come to those
| colloquia, and occasionally Allen Ginsberg. Most
| people forget this, but a considerable amount of
| the inspiration for the poetry of the Beat
| Generation came right through that Academy of
| Asian Studies. Michael McClure and David Meltzer,
| Phil Whalen, Ginsberg and Snyder...I would say all
| of them either directly or indirectly were
| influenced by Haridas Chaudhuri, Alan Watts and
| Frederic Spiegelberg, either directly or
| indirectly, and some of them would be in the
| audiences of those early colloquia and in those
| classes.'
| - Michael Murphy

Here's an insert from Furlong's book, which depicts clearly, just where all that "influence" ended up ...
_______________________________________________

Watts moved into the late Sixties as an aging guru, but still a staple of the underground culture.

More from Furlong's book on Watts:

| 'Counter culture'
|.
| ' ... in New York, indifferent to vision and
| spiritual experience, but unashamedly into "booze,
| speed, downers, ... drugs that provide escape,
| that turn off, toughen, and callous the nerve
| endings." '
|.
| 'Leary's original hope (never fully shared by
| Watts), that if people could experience the sense
| of meaning, unity and wonder given by LSD, then
| social problems would be solved, began to look
| very naive. Mental hospitals bore pathetic witness
| of practical "jokes" played on unsuspecting
| victims who had drunk a soft drink or a cup of
| coffee containing the drug, and were full of
| people who could not "come down" after one or
| more trips.'
|.
| 'The more idealistic among the young had begun
| to think in terms of moving to the country, of
| growing their own food, of starting their own
| farms, and a number moved out into Marin County,
| California, and beyond.'
|.
| 'Others, influenced initially by Watts and
| Snyder, moved on from drugs to Zen. Snyder quoted
| D. T. Suzuki as saying that people who came to the
| Zendo from LSD experiences showed the ability to
| get into god zazen very rapidly. Snyder told the
| English Benedictine monk Dom Alered Graham in 1967
| that "LSD has been a real social catalyst and
| amounts to a genuine historical unpredictable.
| It's changing the lives of all sorts of people.
| It's remarkable and effective and it works in
| terms of forms, devotions, personal deities,
| appearances of bodhisattvas, Buddhas, and gods to
| your eyes. It doesn't work in terms of non-forms,
| emptiness. ("This isn't form is the same as
| emptiness," one Zen teacher who tried it reported,
| "this is emptiness is the same as form.")'

What a pack of idiots. I was an acidhead as well, sad to say, just out for the party, though, not the metaphysics.

Furlong continues ...

| ' "In several American cities," Snyder also
| observed, "traditional meditation halls of both
| Rinzai and Soto are flourishing. Many of the
| newcomers turned to traditional meditation after
| an initial acid experience. The two types of
| experience seem to inform each other. (D. T.
| Suzuki later appeared to go back on the qualified
| respect he had shown for the LSD experience and
| announced that the meditation experience was quite
| distinct from Zen.) '

Actually, I don't think the difference amounts to much. enlightened wisdom without compassion is a great evil, however it is obtained.

Furlong continues ...

| 'Many who had used LSD as an opening to the
| inner world were attracted to formal meditation.
| By the fall of 1966, according to Rick Fields,
| "close to a hundred and fifty people were sitting
| zazen and attending lectures at the San Francisco
| Zen Center; fifty or sixty sat at least once a
| day, and eighty people, twice as many as the
| previous year, had attended the seven day sesshin
| . . . As Zen center itself grew, it naturally.
| spawned a number of satellite centers run by
| senior students . . . in Berkeley, Mill Valley and
| Los Altos.'
|.
| 'San Francisco Zen Center raised a large sum
| of money to buy land at Tassajara Hot Springs in
| the Los Padres National Forest, and the Tassajara
| Zen Mountain Center was founded. More than
| thousand people contributed money.'

What a catastrophe for America. This is 1966, just when things are going to really turn sour in Vietnam.

Furlong continues ...

| ' "It is for us in America," wrote Watts, "to
| realize that the only action is contemplation.
| Otherwise we are caught up in mock progress, which
| is just going or, toward going on, what Buddhists
| call samsara - the squirrel cage of birth and
| death. That people are getting together to acquire
| this property for meditation is one of the most
| hopeful signs of our times.'
|.
| 'So the counterculture had moved by way of
| color, free sex, civil rights, rock music,
| brotherly love, LSD and other psychedelics, and
| innovative lifestyles toward --- at least for some
| people --- a serious interest in meditation. A few
| years later Watts was to say that people who had
| experimented with psychedelic chemicals might find
| that they had left them' behind, "like the raft
| which you use to cross a river, and have found
| growing interest and even pleasure in the simplest
| practice of zazen, which we perform, like idiots,
| without any special purpose.'

No, actually, with very defined goal and purpose. The destruction of America. The ultimate goal of the devilish function is to wreak the greatest havoc possible.

===========================================

More from Michael Murphy on the American Academy of Asian Studies ...

| 'Now it was quite remarkable, thinking back on
| it, the quality of the [faculty] they got. Dr.
| Malalasekhara was there. He was then president of
| the World Buddhist Association. He had been
| Ceylon's ambassador to the Soviet Union, and I'll
| never forget the advice he gave me about
| meditation ... he was not a monk, but he was a
| great believer that Buddhism should move into
| everyday life, and he relieved my conscience when
| he said that you can meditate in a chair. He
| believed in the concept of social action, and he
| had been an ambassador to the Soviet Union and he
| had been ambassador to other countries for Ceylon,
| and so he exemplified what he taught.'
|.
| 'Dilip Kumar Roy, who was Aurobindo's
| perhaps best-loved sadhu, famous in his own right
| before he became Aurobindo's follower, as a writer
| of songs, and a poet, and a member of one of the
| great families of India, was there. He came and
| talked at the Academy for, I think, six months,
| with Indira Devi, who was an inspired singer and
| who sometimes went into trance when she sang--
| electrifying us who were in their classes. I'd
| never heard of ecstatic trances, let alone seen
| one. And I had not been prepared by the Episcopal
| Church where I went for such training. So to see
| religion in action at that level of intensity was
| hair-raising: it was literally hair-raising to me,
| and to all of us. It was an enormous privilege to
| be in their class that was in 1953.'
|.
| 'Rom Landau, author of the book God Is My
| Adventure about his meetings with Krishnamurti,
| Gurdjieff, and the poet-mystic Rudolph Steiner,
| would regale us with stories of this whole
| esoteric scene going back to about 1910. 1 used
| to go up to his apartment late at night and hear
| stories of Rudolph Steiner, Gurdjieff,
| Krishnamurti and all these people. He taught
| courses on Middle Eastern thought and philosophy.'
|.
| 'The list of teachers there was fabulous.
| It made very intimate and real the things we were
| reading about in the books. To see Indira Devi
| sing and go into one of those trances, believe me,
| was something you never forgot: I will never
| forget as long as I live. It must have been
| something like these educated Indian boys coming
| to see Ramakrishna, where their master would go
| into these trances. It was just so incredible and
| he radiated such a light whenever he sang. In
| fact, the story has it that parents would try to
| keep their kids from going to see him because they
| wouldn't come home again! '

A real carnival of stuff. But at the core was Watts and Zen, whose power to undermine is greater than, and totally overwhelming to, the relatively smaller positives of the other cultural and spiritual material being presented. This is always the way of Zen, in transforming whatever it touches into Zen. (Except Nichiren's Buddhism, of course)

Murphy continues ...

| 'And there was something of that around this
| Academy of Asian Studies; I mean, I'm not
| exaggerating. I went into a bookstore down at
| Stanford and there was this kind of wise, tough
| old guy from Arkansas who ran it. I went to get a
| copy of one of Aurobindo's books and he kind of
| cocked his head and looked at me and said, "Ah,
| Spiegelberg ... defiling the young men of Palo
| Alto," and he turned around and said, "Aw, they
| come in here one after another." '

Oh, the truth just pops out of the common people, without acknowledgement or notice by the fake sages.

| 'There was a sense about that school and about
| that circle of teaching that was ... that made an
| unforgettable impression on people there .... You
| could go as far as you wanted with people like
| Haridas or Spiegelberg or Rom Landau.'
| - Michael Murphy

Maybe you could go vastly farther than you intended, in an unintended direction.

| 'The public responded to this unusual new
| creation and enrollment in the classes steadily
| climbed, but the path was by no means an easy one
| for the Academy. As an unprecedented experiment,
| the Academy operated in an environment of general
| ignorance, if not outright hostility.'
|.
| 'Let me relate here a little incident from my
| own personal experience. It was at San Francisco
| in May, 1951. 1 was waiting for a public bus at a
| street corner. An elderly man watched me from a
| distance and approached with the friendly inquiry:
| "Are you a yogi?" I paused to think for a while
| what might be his notion of a yogi and why he took
| me for one. I was wondering what I should say to
| satisfy his inquisitiveness, but he did not wait
| for my reply. Perhaps he thought that since I was
| from India I must be a yogi. So he produced his
| palm before me and said "Would you care to read my
| palm and tell me whether I have any good luck in
| the near future? The other day I bought a good
| lottery ticket, you know." '
| - Haridas Chaudhuri

Actually, Haridas should have heeded the admonition from this person, to abandon his evil course and to pursue some other line of work, like fortune telling.

| 'When I brought in Rom Landau I immediately
| got a call from the French Consul-- he wanted to
| talk to me, he wanted to know why I was bringing
| in this man. Landau had helped the King of Morocco
| and the Moroccans when they were fighting for
| their independence, and the French tried to get me
| to throw him out. I said, well, I'm not interested
| in his political views, I'm only interested in
| whether he's qualified to teach what he's
| teaching-- I think he is and so he stays!'
|.
| 'And then one time we had the British
| Consul-- I was at a reception for Gandhi at the
| Indian Consul's home and there was the British
| Consul and one of the T.V. commentators and they
| cornered me and said "Why do you have this fellow
| here? You know he's not very good..." I said,
| well, I'm not interested in what you're talking
| about, about his being persona non grata etc.;
| he's a good man and we're going to keep him! '
| - Louis Gainsborough

Considering that Spiegelberg and Watts hijacked his money and Academy and turned it into something that was not his intent ... I would state categorically that Louis Gainsborough was not a good judge of character.

| 'More significant, however, were the financial
| difficulties. No other major contributor came
| forward and support of the Academy rested almost
| entirely with Gainsborough.'

So, Spiegelberg and Watts betrayed their sole means of support. How very Zen indeed.

| 'As we got going into the Academy nobody would
| give us any money, and, you know, there's a limit
| to what one man can do. On top of that, I was
| neglecting my business: we began to have heavy
| losses because I wasn't minding the store.'
| - Louis Gainsborough

Uh, no, that was not the reason. Here's a little non-Zen poetry ...

| Louis Gainsborough's heavy losses
| were the clear effects of evil causes.
| Spiegelberg and Watts would then
| scrounge around to feed their Zen.
|.
| 'Gainsborough quietly established an
| independent company, the Login International
| Corporation, to provide a dependable source of
| income for the Academy.'
|.
| 'That I felt would put the school on a sound
| basis and so I more or less let the school run on
| as well as it could while I went out trying to
| raise money this way.'
|.
| 'We were building two plants in Morocco--
| one an orange-concentrating plant and the other a
| fish-canning plant-- when we were hit by an
| earthquake that practically wiped us out. I tried
| to salvage something out of it, but we just
| couldn't, so that ended that effort to finance the
| school.'
| '-- Louis Gainsborough'

Two Moroccan plants taken out with one quake. An auspicous occurrence, indeed.

| 'Alan Watts became the Dean of the American
| Academy of Asian Studies, in 1955'
|.
| 'In the autumn of 1952 the Academy of Asian
| Studies ran out of funds. Our financial angel had
| bad luck in his business and couldn't pay our
| salaries. Spiegelberg resigned as director and
| went back to full-time teaching at Stanford, but
| I, having nothing else to do, decided that the
| Academy was an adventure too interesting to be
| abandoned, and slipped by default (as always seems
| to happen to me) into the position of its
| administrator. '

Frederic Spiegelberg had done his thing. On to the next victim for this great and evil friend.

Alan Watts knew that if he ever stopped, he would be consumed by the evil that he had created. Eventually, he was.

| 'By this time the Academy had moved from the
| financial district to a splendidly rambling old
| mansion on Broadway Street in Pacific Heights,
| overlooking the Golden Gate, the hills of Marin,
| and Angel Island. From then until the autumn of
| 1956, 1 managed to keep this strangely off-beat
| and exciting project alive with the help of a
| gifted, if desperate, multiracial faculty and a
| cluster of amazingly devoted students....'
|.
| 'Among our students at this time there were
| also Michael Murphy and Richard Price, who
| together founded the Esalen Institute at Big Sur
| ...'
| - Alan Watts

There we are. His true mission in life was to foster this very pair: Murphy and Price.

They were to be his greatest gift to the world, and the most terrible. Esalen was to be the home of what would become the various Lay organizations of Zen.

| 'Speaking about his teaching at the Academy at
| that time, Watts says,'
|.
| 'My own approach to Asian philosophy was part
| of an individual philosophical quest. I am not
| interested in Buddhism or Taoism as particular
| entities or subjects to be studied and defined in
| such a way that one must avoid "mixing up" one's
| thinking about Buddhism with interests in quantum
| theory, psychoanalysis, Gestalt psychology,
| semantics, and aesthetics, or in Eckhart, Goethe,
| Whitehead, Jung, or Krishnamurti. I feel about
| academic "subjects" just as the Balinese feel
| about "Art" when they say, "We have no Art: we
| just do everything as well as possible...." '
|.
| 'I would announce in the formal catalogue
| the offering of a course in Lao-tze or Chinese
| Zen, and simply make sure that the students had
| access to the relevant literature, that they
| understood its historical background, and were
| familiar with its main technical terms. For the
| rest, I would use the original texts as a basis
| for rambling reflections that might take us into
| Tantric yoga, optical illusions, metalinguistics,
| biological systems-theory, and hypnosis.... It has
| always seemed to me that no intelligent person
| should restrict himself to artificially segregated
| fields of spiritual or intellectual adventure....
| Culture is an active, present process which
| involves the formation of relationships between
| all things known to us, and the narrow specialist
| is its servant and informant, not its arbiter.'
| - Alan Watts

By mixing everything under the sun with Zen, you can use all of those things to attract students and the unwary and unfortunate. The true intent is to undermine their lives with Zen, which is the "active ingredient" in the mixture.

| 'In retrospect one can see that the Academy of
| Asian Studies was a transitional institution
| emerging from the failure of universities and
| churches to satisfy important spiritual needs. It
| was a bridge between the idea of a graduate school
| and the idea of a "growth center," such as the
| Esalen Institute, of which there are now more than
| a hundred in North America. '

First Esalen, then the world. Mass indoctrination, mass mesmerization, and then the undermining of the masses with exposure to the "mind of Bodhidharma", to the meaninglessness of life. (See Toxic Zen Story #25: Alan Watts and Empty Values).

| 'But in those mid-1950s neither the College of
| the Pacific nor the Academy's own board of
| trustees (who contributed virtually nothing to its
| maintenance except their names) were interested in
| questions of human identity and the transformation
| of consciousness. I am not a man of business for
| the simple reason that the calculations and
| paperwork of business bore me to death, and
| therefore I had gone naively ahead for three years
| raising funds for the institution, teaching, and
| doing the academic administration without fully
| realizing that our official substructure was
| worthless. We were running a very lively
| enterprise, but our official sponsors were
| embarrassed and uninterested, and would neither
| assist the work nor get out of the way. By the end
| of 1956 it was becoming clear that I was as much
| out of place in the groves of academe as in the
| Church, that I was never, never going to be an
| organization man, and that I must make up my mind
| finally to go it alone.'
|.
| 'Thus in the spring of 1957 1 left the
| Academy to its trustees, who then appointed the
| venerable Theosophist Ernest Wood as its
| president. But the job was beyond the powers of
| this wonderful but failing old man, and after the
| College of the Pacific severed relations a year or
| so later, the project faded into dismal obscurity.
| And then Haridas Chaudhuri went off on his own and
| replaced it with the California Academy of Asian
| Studies, which is where something of the original
| tradition of the work is now alive and kicking
| quite interestingly.'
| - Alan Watts
|.
| 'Just when I thought all was lost, along came
| another spiritually-minded person [Haridas
| Chaudhuri] to carry the torch. I felt that sooner
| or later... so much had happened that I had a
| feeling that we were being led along a road and
| that it would eventually evolve into what it
| should be; I had that belief in me, I have a very
| strong belief in God, so I felt that somehow this
| would go along, that somehow or other it would be
| saved.'
| - Louis Gainsborough

So, the spiritual torch of the institution with the permanent mission to corrupt the masses, was finally passed to Sri Aurobindo's follower Haridas Chaudhuri, which explains why Aurobindo's demise was so shocking and sudden.

____ Epilog _______________________________________

The Buddha's highest teachings were the purpose of the Buddha's advent on this earth.

The Buddha did not appear on this earth to drain people's compassion with discussions of the emptiness and meaninglessness of life which is just a void.

The Buddha did not appear on this earth to teach people to live in such a narrow and momentary way, that there would be no context for self-examination and conscience.

The Buddha did not appear on this earth to possess people's minds with such illogic as to befuddle their ability to choose correctly between what is good and what is evil.

The Buddha did not appear on this earth to teach people how to commit atrocities and genocide, in the exploration of their "infinite possibilities", or "new states of being".

The Buddha did not appear on this earth to teach people how to maim and kill with their hands efficiently, quietly, loudly, with increased terror inflicted, or to maximize their subjugation to control the public sentiments for political ends.

These are all profoundly evil distortions of the Buddha's true teachings, which introduce infinities in the variables holding good and evil, removing all shades of gray in the propositional calculus of value.

Simply stated, the Buddha made his advent on this earth with the purpose of teaching the compassionate way of the bodhisattva, which is at the heart of the true entity of all phenomena, which is the eternal Buddha at one with the eternal Law. Which is how to navigate the sea of sufferings of birth, aging, sickness and death. He originally set out on his path, because of his observation of the sufferings of common people and wanting to understand the source of those sufferings (enlightened wisdom) and how to transform those sufferings into unshakable happiness (enlightened action).

When you embrace the void and acausality, your initial intention to explore transformation of consciousness doesn't matter ... the result is always the same: chaos and misery, and utter ruination and emptiness to you, your family, and your country.

But things don't have to be that way ...
___________________________________________________

Nichiren Daishonin writes (Encouragement to a Sick Person, WND p. 78):

. "During the Former and Middle Days of the Law, the
. five impurities began to appear, and in the Latter
. Day, they are rampant. They give rise to the great
. waves of a gale, which not only beat against the
. shore, but strike each other. The impurity of
. thought has been such that, as the Former and
. Middle Days of the Law gradually passed, people
. transmitted insignificant erroneous teachings
. while destroying the unfathomable correct
. teaching. It therefore appears that more people
. have fallen into the evil paths because of errors
. with respect to Buddhism than because of secular
. misdeeds."

Because Bodhidharma discarded the Buddha's highest teaching (the Lotus Sutra), and due to his lazy nature turned to shortcuts to enlightenment, he came to the distorted view that life is acausal and empty, that the true entity is the void.

This erroneous view really comes from a misunderstanding of the Sutra of Immeasurable Meanings, where the True Entity is described by negation (the only way it can be): "... neither square, nor round, neither short, nor long, ..."

The description of the True Entity is logically voidal, but the True Entity itself is not. Bodhidharma was simply confused, due to the slander of negligence (laziness), and false confidence. The truth of life is that at the heart of the True Entity is the compassion of a bodhisattva for others.

Non-substantiality does not mean empty. Life has value. Humans are respectworthy. There is a purpose to everything. And every cause has an effect, so we are responsible for our thoughts, words and deeds. Zen is acausal. Zen is the greatest poison, which compares to the even greater medicine of the Lotus Sutra.

Suffice it to say: the purpose of Zen in the world is to corrupt and undermine everything that is not based upon the truth and the true teaching. All religions, disciplines, institutions and organizations which are undermined by Zen will eventually fall after glaring revelation of their worst defects, sooner rather than later.

If there is some good in your family, locality, society and culture, or country that you would like to retain, then cease the Zen, and begin to apply the medicine of the Lotus Sutra to heal the Zen wound in your life.

"Zen is the work of devilish minds." - Nichiren

-Chas.

. a prescription for the poisoned ones:
.
. The only antidote for the toxic effects of Zen in your life ...
.
. be that from Zen meditation, or the variant forms: physical
. Zen in the martial arts, Qigong, Acupuncture, Falun Gong,
. Copenhagen Convention of Quantum Mechanics, EST,
. Landmark Education, Nazism, Bushido, the Jesuits,
. Al Qaeda, or merely from having the distorted view that life
. is acausal, and that the true entity of all phenomena
. is the void ...
.
. with the effects of the loss of loved ones, detachment,
. isolation or various forms of emptiness in your life ...
.
. is the Lotus Sutra: chant Nam-Myoho-Renge-Kyo
. at least 3 times, twice a day, for the rest of your life,
. in at least a whisper ...
.
. and if you can, chant abundantly in a resonant voice !!!
.
. The full 28 Chapters of the Lotus Sutra,
. Nichiren Daishonin's Gosho volumes I and II,
. the Record of the Orally Transmitted Teachings
. (Gosho Zenshu, including the Ongi Kuden) and the
. SGI Dictionary of Buddhism are located at:
.
http://www.nichirenlibrary.org/en/
.
. To find an SGI Community Center:
.
http://www.sgi-usa.org/sgilocations/
__________________________________

LS Chap. 16 .....

All harbor thoughts of yearning
and in their minds thirst to gaze at me.
When living beings have become truly faithful,
honest and upright, gentle in intent,
single-mindedly desiring to see the Buddha
not hesitating even if it costs them their lives,
then I and the assembly of monks
appear together on Holy Eagle Peak.
At that time I tell the living beings
that I am always here, never entering extinction,
but that because of the power of an expedient means
at times I appear to be extinct, at other times not,
and that if there are living beings in other lands
who are reverent and sincere in their wish to believe,
then among them too
I will preach the unsurpassed Law.